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AMENDMENT OF THE LAW

And the Leader of the Opposition—I am obliged to my hon. Friend. The speech that I wanted to make nearly hit the buffers in the sense that the wind was taken out of my sails. However, I want to place on the record my thanks to the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood) for making it relevant. One of the traditional knockabouts in these debates—which I though was going to go missing, but which, certainly from my point of view, has come back into play—consists of the doom and gloom that Opposition Members put about and the talk about black holes. Other colleagues mentioned all that sort of stuff. In preparation for that, I looked at the financial press with a little care over the past six weeks or so to see what was being said in the run-up to the Budget. It is often said in this place that much of the press is not necessarily friendly to the Labour party—[Laughter.] I hear laughter from Conservative Members. I am not sure which papers they read—I see that no one wants to intervene to tell me. If, as the right hon. Member for Wokingham would have us believe, the Chancellor has got it so wrong in his Budgets over 10 years, let us, almost counter-intuitively, consider the situation in the City of London, which is traditionally thought of as not looked after efficiently or well by the Labour party. A reputable broadsheet that is not always favourable to the Labour party published some figures on the City of London in the past few weeks. It showed that 4.6 million people were employed in London, which is 15 per cent. of the UK total. The number of people employed in the City is 340,000, while up to 1 million are involved in support services. Some 9 per cent. of our gross domestic product is produced from financial services, which is up from 7 per cent. 10 years ago. The City of London’s share of the global foreign equity market is 43 per cent., and it accounts for 36 per cent. of global derivates. The City accounts for 31 per cent. of world currency trading, which is more than New York and Tokyo combined.